


Behind the Music

by soundczechfic



Category: Johnny's Entertainment, KAT-TUN (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, Community: kizuna_exchange, M/M, Minor Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-17
Updated: 2017-04-17
Packaged: 2018-10-20 02:28:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,226
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10653042
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/soundczechfic/pseuds/soundczechfic
Summary: AU; Jin is a teen busker and some scrawny kid tries to move in on his territory.





	Behind the Music

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted April 22 2010 for in kizuna_exchange for spiritdream.

Jin likes American songs best, the kind you can get up and dance to, with a pulsing bassline and filthy lyrics. He plays Usher and R Kelly to the small clusters of shoppers and salarymen that stream out of the train station in the evening. He throws in a Kinki Kids or SMAP song every now and again. These are crowdpleasers. He doesn't really care for them, but whenever he plays _Lion Heart_ he is virtually guaranteed a fistful of thousand yen notes. _Garasu no Shounen_ paid for his vintage leather jacket, for his ripped jeans and expensive sneakers. The Beatles will probably pay for his first car.  
  
He has played in this spot almost every other day since he was thirteen. He has regular customers, the old lady who owns the dango shop and the guy, not much older than Jin himself, who inherited the tofu shop from his father. Jin even has groupies, mostly pairs of nervously giggling twelve year old girls from the junior high down the street. They throw heavy 500 yen coins in his upturned fedora and shriek when he smiles his thanks. Jin is a local institution.  
  
When he lugs his Casio Keytone into the square one afternoon and sees a scrawny kid with messy hair playing guitar (pretty badly, Jin thinks) and singing enka for a group of enthusiastic old ladies, his reaction is more shock than rage. He drops his bag at his feet, wobbling a little from the weight of the keyboard strapped across his back.  
  
"Eh??" he says. In four years of coming here this has never happened before, and it takes him a minute to truly comprehend the interloper spewing enka all over his territory.  
  
The rage starts to set in. He moves closer.  
  
Up close, the kid looks about thirteen or fourteen, maybe fifteen if you took him out of the gigantic black hoodie that swims around his slender body. In contrast, his jeans are a little too small, ripped at the knees and showing too much ankle. He has a strange angular face like a fox. His fuzzy eyebrows crumple with concentration as he strums his guitar, which is old and wooden with a profusion of faded hand painted flowers spilling over the body. He looks up and smiles when Eri-chan the florist drops a few coins into the beat up baseball cap at his feet; in the brief flash of grin Jin sees he is slightly gap-toothed. Jin's heart thumps with fury.  
  
He wants to storm over, rip the guitar from the brat's hands and smash it on the pavement, but a lot of the women standing around are Jin's regulars. They probably wouldn't like it if he started terrorising skinny little kids, even if he is totally justified.  
  
He stands paralysed as the kid starts playing an old Bob Dylan song. His English is garbled and thickly accented, nowhere near as good as Jin's own. He has a high, imperfect voice that wobbles a little in his lower register, as if he is scratching the depths of his breath  There's a sweetness in the breaking sighs that is dangerous to Jin. Buskers don't have to be perfect. They just have to hold the hearts of the passing crowd in their grasp.  
  
This kid must be eliminated.  
  
-  
  
When Jin walks into the square the very next day to find that same fucking kid poaching his audience, he snaps. He manages, barely, to wait until the kid is packing up his guitar and the crowd has drifted into the surrounding shops and houses. The second they are alone he stalks right up into that kid's space and pokes him in his boney chest.  
  
"I play here," he says. "I've always played here."  
  
The kid's shoulders are tense and square; the geometry of his body is all acute angles. "Excuse me?"  
  
"This is my spot," Jin says. "You're trespassing."  
  
"Oh," the kid says. "I'm sorry, I didn't realise."  
  
Jin, who had been expecting fighting and shoving rather than this polite acquiescence, is thrown. "Huh?" he says, and scratches his head through thick, messy hair. "Um, ok. Just don't let it happen again."  
  
The kid just clicks the clasps of his case into place and walks away.  
  
-  
  
It’s not quite a beautiful day. The sky is a pale, timid blue, folding here and there into fields of fluffy white clouds. It rained all morning and the streets have been washed clean; the leaves are thick and green on the trees that line the boundaries of the square. Jin swings happily from side to side and feels the reassuring weight of his keyboard gaining momentum, making him a human pendulum, fast swinging out of control. He grips the straps tighter.  
  
Jin loves to sing. He could probably make more money working evening shifts at the conbini or walking dogs like his friend Sawada, but he wouldn't be able to feel his spirits lifting as his voice rose; wouldn't feel his ego beat in time with people's dancing feet. He likes the thought of some random salaryman humming his songs as he draws a bath at night; of schoolgirls singing as they muddle through their boring homework. He wants to be the bright spot in somebody's day.  
  
When he reaches his destination and sees that kid sitting his spot for the third day in a row, he snaps. There is nobody around as he stomps over and kicks the faded baseball hat. Coins jangle across the ground and the kid stops mid-song to exclaim, "Hey!"  
  
“I thought we had an understanding,” Jin says, hearing a shrill whine in his voice that embarrasses him. He tries to pitch his voice lower, manlier. Intimidating. “You weren’t going to play here anymore.”  
  
The kid puts down his guitar and squares up to Jin, a few inches shorter but so angry. He is all taut muscles and clenched teeth. He tilts his jaw up arrogantly. Jin wants to break it. “I apologised for the inconvenience,” he says. His eyes are thin and evil like a cartoon villain. “I didn’t say I’d stop.”  
  
“Yeah?” Jin says.  
  
The kid puts his hands on his hips. His gigantic hoodie bunches in folds around the pressure of his fingers. “Yeah,” he says.  
  
“Fine!” Jin spits, and rips the keyboard off his back. He sets it up a few feet in front of the kid’s guitar case, blocking him from the view of passers by. He flicks on the power and ramps up the volume. Nobody will be able to hear him sing over the volume of the music, but at least they won’t be able to hear that little shit’s stupid guitar either.  
  
He starts with Savage Garden’s _Crash and Burn_ , because it always makes the passing women stop and look at him with misty eyes. After the week he has had, he needs some women swooning at his feet. As he plays the beat soothes his anger and he closes his eyes and sings sweetly and earnestly; there is something embarrassing about feeling this open as he sings, but he can’t help it. Music makes him emotional. It eases the tightness and tension he sometimes feels and makes him feel bigger and stronger than he ever was before.  
  
When he opens his eyes the kid is sprawled on the ground with his big backpack and guitar case at his side, leaning back on his arms and looking at Jin with a slight smile. Hair spills from below his floppy beanie and Jin realises his eyes aren’t cold and thin, they’re warm and dark and pretty, and for a minute his voice catches on a high note, breaks roughly as he brings the note back down. The kid’s grins.  
  
He sits and listens through three songs, maybe four, and then he takes a few coins out of his beat up baseball cap and throws them in Jin’s fedora. He flashes Jin a shy gap-toothed smile, and then he walks away.  
  
-  
  
The next day when Jin reaches the station, the kid has already packed up his guitar case. He is sitting on a low stone wall eating onigiri in the same hoodie he has worn every day. His baseball hat is sitting beside him, overflowing with change.  
  
“Hey,” he says as Jin walks towards him.  
  
Jin frowns. “You’re not playing today?”  
  
“I finished up already,” the kid says. There is a grain of rice clinging to the side of his mouth. Jin fights the urge to swipe it off, which he would do without a thought if it were one of his friends. The kid holds himself as if his personal space is an impenetrable barrier of which Jin is wary of stepping inside. After a minute the kid seems to notice and swipes it off himself with the tip of one callused finger; he lifts it to his lips and licks it up with his small pink tongue.  
  
“Oh,” Jin says dumbly. He puts his keyboard down and shoves his hands in his back pockets.  
  
“I won’t play in the evenings anymore,” the kid says. His speaking voice is sort of low and serious; he sounds older than Jin thinks he is. “It’s okay if I play beforehand, right?”  
  
“Oh,” Jin says, baffled by this sharp turnabout. “Yeah.” He smiles slightly. “Every headliner needs a good support band, right?”  
  
The kid snickers. “Whatever,” he says. “I’m Kamenashi,” he adds, and bows slightly; his behaviour is this strange mix of politeness and insolence, as if he got halfway through finishing school before being stolen away and raised by wolves.  
  
“Jin,” Jin says. “I mean, I’m Akanishi Jin.”  
  
“Nice to meet you,” Kamenashi says, and bows again. “Please look after me.”  
  
-  
  
After that, Kamenashi stays and watches Jin play every day, clapping along with the old ladies that gather with their shopping baskets full of vegetables and tofu. Sometimes he stays while Jin starts packing up, fiddling with his bags and asking Jin questions about his day. Sometimes he asks Jin for advice about singing and performing. Jin doesn’t want to admit he doesn’t really know what he’s talking about when he answers, so he just repeats the things he has heard in American movies about singing from your diaphragm and putting your all into it.  
  
Kamenashi blushes when Jin says he has a pretty voice, and says, “I’m not really a musician like you.”  
  
“What’s a musician?” Jin says. He sits next to Kamenashi on the bench and leans back on his elbows, looking up at the darkening sky. “I just love to sing.”  
  
“Me too,” Kamenashi says. “It makes the world seem brighter.”  
  
-  
  
Sometimes, Jin sings _Good Riddance (Time Of Your Life)_. He always sings it a capella because his keyboard sounds so clunky and intrusive with the simple melody. It’s one of the first songs he knew how to sing all the way through in English, part of a two or three month obsession with Green Day and American punk music. His fixation abruptly ended when he broke up with his girlfriend at the time, because Billie Joe’s deranged face just reminded him of the posters on her walls.  
  
He always sings it when he’s feeling lonely.  
  
He sings it on an overcast Thursday evening when the passing crowd all seem damp and grey and miserable. He always feels nervous singing a capella, imagining the crowd hearing every bump and imperfection in his voice; knowing they can hear, now, that his accent makes soft L’s out of hard R’s, or the way his voice sometimes wobbles with emotion.  
  
_Another turning point, a fork stuck in the road  
time grabs you by the wrist directs you where to go_  
  
He’s only a few lines in when he is joined by a slightly clumsy guitar, the chords sounding a little wobbly and uncertain like his voice. He looks across and there is Kamenashi sitting beside him, strumming his guitar and looking a little hesitant, as if he’s not sure if this will be okay.  
  
Jin’s smile breaks out of him and so does his voice, lifting in song almost out of his control.  
  
Kamenashi begins to sing about halfway through the song, his voice slipping in beneath Jin’s; they are not quite in harmony. It is more like their voices are reaching out to one another, each trying to figure out where the other fits.  
  
Jin looks down at Kamenashi as they sing the final lines and in the crowd the group of girls that have always left him love letters and sobbed his name after ballads are clutching each other and shrieking a little. Jin wonders what it is they see. He needs someone to explain to him what has just happened; whatever it is, it feels momentous, but he doesn’t understand why.  
  
-  
  
Jin begins to talk about Kamenashi to his family and friends, but in doing so, he realises that he doesn’t really know anything about him. His mother asks him where he goes to school, what his parents do, about his siblings and friends and where he lives, and Jin realises with a start that he has no idea about any of these things.  
  
These are the things Akanishi Jin knows about Kamenashi Kazuya:  
  
1\. He plays in the town square every day.  
2\. He taught himself to play guitar.  
3\. He likes dorky Japanese bands and weird American music that old people listen to.  
4\. He likes kids.  
5\. He likes animals.  
6\. He has just turned sixteen years old.  
  
Jin feels a sudden impulse to run off and find Kamenashi right this second. He wants to sit him down and interrogate him, compile a list of those little pieces until he can sit down and put them together. Until he knows who Kamenashi is.  
  
He doesn’t know where to find Kamenashi, though. He doesn’t even know where to start.  
  
-  
  
He begins to quiz Kamenashi every night while he’s packing up. Kamenashi sits on the wall beside him and swings his legs, hands beneath his knees. His answers to Jin’s questions are polite but reluctant; he only every gives away a single fact at a time. It’s like being a contestant on some kind of elaborate quiz show. Jin is working hard for the grand prize.  
  
Kamenashi’s father is a salaryman who works for a computer company Kamenashi does not know the name of. His mother stays at home. They live in a condo a few stations over, on the fifth floor overlooking a park. He goes to the boy’s school around the corner from where they play in the afternoons. He has two dogs, Ran and Jelly.  
  
There’s something wistful in Kamenashi’s voice as he tells Jin these things. He looks Jin square in the eye as he speaks but his eyes are like one-sided glass. Jin can’t see what’s going on inside. Jin starts to think of him as a lonely person; he always wants Jin to stay until the absolute last moment that he possibly can. Jin reluctantly leaves when his mother calls him to nag him about being late.  
  
Nobody ever calls for Kamenashi.  
  
Sometimes, Jin ignores his mother’s calls and she sends Reio down to get him. Walking away from Kamenashi on those nights feels like it used to when Reio was just starting school and Jin had to drop him off on the way to class; he remembers Reio’s tiny hands clutching his teacher’s and him looking back with glassy eyes and a wobbling chin; if Jin looked back Reio would burst into tears and run for Jin’s knees.  
  
Whenever Jin looks back at Kamenashi, he’s got his head down and his guitar in his lap, carefully plucking out chords.  
  
-  
  
The first time Jin sees Kamenashi away from their usual spot, it is almost midnight and Jin is on his way home from playing FIFA at Sawada's place. He had been on a winning streak all night. He is not usually good at video games; he doesn't have the patience or dexterity, and his A+B+BA combination to often becomes AAAA+BBBBBAB+A. Tonight he was on fire, his little soccer players destroying Sawada's in what must have been an embarrassing upset victory. He'd spent twenty minutes smugly rubbing it in until Sawada had practically forced him out the door, turning the latch in response to his protests.  
  
When he turns the corner and sees Kamenashi crossing the street, backpack hanging low on his hips and hoodie up, hiding his face, he almost doesn't recognize him. He is wearing the same clothes as always and Jin recognizes the firm line of his shoulders on an almost instinctual level, but it comes as a shock to see him out here in the big wide world.  
  
The Kamenashi Jin has slowly drawn out of his shell is cocky and kind of obnoxious. He stands in the crowd and heckles Jin sometimes, giggling with apparent delight when Jin grows red and flustered, when he forgets the lyrics or misses a note. He is the loud voice that cheers and claps over the spattered and polite applause whenever Jin finishes up a set. Sometimes he will reach out and take half of whatever Jin is eating without even asking and stuff it in his mouth whole. When they argue he is prickly and hard; he never backs down when Jin starts advancing on his, even though he's only like half Jin's size. Jin doesn't want to think about what would happen if they ever got in an actual fight; Jin is big and strong but cowardly. Kamenashi is scrappy and fast and would probably wipe him out in seconds. Jin doesn't take his chances. Whenever he sees real heat in Kame's eyes he starts teasing him out of it. The kid is quick to anger but even quicker to forgiveness.  
  
The Kamenashi of the outside world looks almost startlingly frail and wary in comparison. He walks with his head down, hiding inside his hood. One hand clutches the strap of his backpack tightly. The guitar case is swinging from the other. Jin wonders if he ever goes home.  
  
Jin is about to call out when suddenly, Kamenashi is gone.  
  
"Eh?" Jin says, running to close the distance that had been between them. He is now standing in of the tall steel gate of an elemntary school. It is slightly ajar.  He prods at it and calls, "Kamenashi?" but he's too afraid to raise his voice. The playground looks grim and murderous in the blue-white glare of the street lights; the shadow of the jungle gym looks like a giant rib cage, cracked open on the ground.  
  
Jin creeps along, heart beating petrified at the thought of the ghosts of dead schoolchildren that he's sure are chasing his shadow. "Kamenashi," he hisses again, wondering what he has gotten himself in for; whatever Kamenashi is doing in an abandoned schoolyard after dark, it probably isn't good. Jin looks around uneasily, half expecting to see Kamenashi coming through a window with a stolen computer or scrawling his name on the wall in neon pink spraypaint.  
  
All of a sudden, noise cuts across the playground, making Jin gasp and stumble over his feet. The snuffling of a monster, breathy and congested. He clutches his heart over his coat.  
  
_Calm down,_ he thinks as he slowly turns towards the sound. _You're Bruce Willis._  
  
It's just Kamenashi, tucked inside the cubby house across the yard, curled up around his guitar inside a ratty sleeping bag, snoring.  
  
Jin stands there for a long time.  
  
-  
  
That night, Jin doesn't sleep. He lies awake in his single bed, looking up at the defaced posters of Johnny's boys he has tacked up on the wall. Yamashita Tomohisa looks down on him from behind his dripping fangs and Hitler moustache, horns piercing through his fashionably mussed hair. Jin doesn't know the others’ names; they are miscellaneous disfigured faces with warts and pirate style scars.  
  
He counts the number of rhinestones on their costumes, trying not to think about the shivering and tense line of Kamenashi's body inside his sleeping bag. He alternates between fear and confusing rage; Kamenashi might get raped or murdered or something sleeping out there like that, so why doesn't he just go home like a normal person?? Has he had a fight with his parents? Maybe his grades were so bad that they screamed at him and he stormed out and was too proud to go back. Maybe he'll go back in the morning when he misses Ran and Jelly too much. He can't just plan to stay out there like that every night.  
  
Jin ran away once, when he was ten years old. He made it as far as the McDonalds on the corner before some creepy old guy started talking to him and he gave in and went home out of sheer terror.  
  
Kamenashi will go home too, Jin thinks. He'll walk in and his mother will cry and fix him a snack, like Jin's did. She'll fuss over him and tell him she loves him and she's sorry. Kamenashi will sleep in a clean, warm bed.  
  
Everything will be okay.  
  
-  
  
Kamenashi is totally normal when Jin next sees him, which is a relief because Jin had half expected him to suddenly be one eyed and bruised all over. He's playing _Yesterday_ and crooning with his goofy, clumsy English. A group of schoolgirls cluster around and squeal.  
  
They have now known each other three months; Jin looks at him with fresh eyes and sees that he has grown a few inches and that his hair has grown long and wild, pieces falling free where he has tried to pin them into submission.  
  
He is wearing the same clothes he wore the day they met. The same clothes he wears almost every day, just slight variations in the layering and combination.  
  
He smiles when Jin sits down beside him and they finish out the song together, just their voices and Kamenashi's solemn guitar.  
  
Later, when Jin asks him how he slept, Kamenashi just smiles and says, "like a baby."  
  
-  
  
Three nights in a row, Jin follows Kamenashi to the schoolyard, lurking a block or so behind and feeling his heart sink when Kamenashi turns into the school gates. Every night he hopes that Kamenashi will take a different route, one that leads him to the little condo he shares with his parents and his beloved pet dogs. Every night Kamenashi crawls into the dark cubby house alone.  
  
-  
  
Jin takes to bringing lots of food with him to the square in the afternoons, stealing onigiri and leftovers from his mother’s supply. She just thinks he’s hungry because he’s a growing young boy and fills his bento to bursting every morning before she sends him off to school. Jin makes a show of eating a few bites in the afternoons and then complaining loudly about how he’s full or the food tastes bad until Kamenashi snaps that if Jin’s just going to waste it then he may as well eat it himself. He takes Jin’s chopsticks without hesitation ( _indirect kiss_ , some childish part of Jin whispers) and stuffs his face. Jin realises eventually that he will eat absolutely anything except pickled plums; he screws up his nose whenever they appear and eats conspicuously around them. He leaves a bento box practically licked clean but for the little pile of pickled plums in the corner.  
  
Jin goes home and tells his mother that he doesn’t like pickled plums anymore. She sighs, but stops putting them in his lunch.  
  
Sometimes, Jin wants to tell her about Kamenashi and all the things he isn’t supposed to know. He wants her to wrap him up in a hug and tell him what to do, but he can’t. If he tells her she might call the cops or try to find Kamenashi’s parents, the way any responsible parent would do. Jin knows he is young and irresponsible and stupid, but he also knows that Kamenashi wouldn’t live like this if he didn’t have a good reason. He wouldn’t live like this if he felt he had any other choice.  
  
So Jin can’t tell her. It isn’t his secret to tell.  
  
-  
  
The season turns and it starts getting colder. Jin spends a lot of time lying in bed wondering if Kamenashi is warm enough, if he’s getting enough sleep. One afternoon he goes to the local department store and buys a thick, plush blanket, crimson red and covered in tiny black stars. He leaves it in the cubby house on his way to the square. He hopes Kamenashi finds it before a security guard or one of the packs of roving kids that sometimes hang out on the school grounds after hours. Kamenashi never mentions it, but he has no reason to; he still doesn’t know that Jin knows. That he’s a runaway or an orphan or homeless, or whatever.  
  
Sometimes when they’re talking in the evenings, Kamenashi will look at him a certain way, and Jin will be sure he’s about to tell him. Jin will be telling a story about his mother or Reio, about something dumb or hilarious or enraging that one of them did, and Kamenashi will look at him with naked envy in his eyes, mouth crumbling over a firm jaw.  
  
“Jin,” he says one day. They’re sitting side by side on a bench, watching as the city lights grow brighter as the daylight fades. “What do you want to be when you grow up?”  
  
Jin shrugs. The air is crisp and raises goosebumps on his skin, but he can feel the warmth of Kamenashi’s body pressed up against his arm.  
  
“Famous,” he says, giggling a little in response to Kamenashi’s barked laughter. Kamenashi leans his head on Jin’s shoulder and Jin is a little surprised to feel his heart flip, as if Kamenashi is a pretty girl. Absently, Jin wonders where Kamenashi bathes; the way he lives his life, he should smell like sweat and squalor, like the men that lie around outside Shinjuku station, but he doesn’t. He smells like cheap liquid soap, the kind you find in hand dispensers in the bathrooms at McDonalds or at the mall - like mysterious, synthetic flowers and suds.  
  
“Don’t forget me,” Kamenashi says. His hair brushes Jin’s cheek and makes him want to giggle. “Don’t forget me when you’re on Music Station.”  
  
“What are you talking about?” Jin says. He wraps his hand around Kamenashi’s fist so they’re not quite holding hands. “I’m taking you with me.”  
  
Kamenashi turns and looks up at Jin, smiling slightly. When he reaches up and kisses Jin’s cheek, it’s almost not weird.  
  
-  
  
Jin takes Kamenashi out for ramen one day when the passersby have been particularly generous. He has been in a nostalgic mood all evening, playing the old songs his mother and Kamenashi like; The Beatles and Eric Clapton, a little bit of The Rolling Stones. His selection makes the salarymen more generous.  
  
"Let's go eat," he says, scooping huge handfuls of coins out of his fedora. "My treat."  
  
Someone had thrown him a crisp 1000 yen note. He stuffs it down the back of Kamenashi's hoodie as he passes, giggling in response to his yelp. He watches as Kamenashi stuffs his hand down the back of his hood, fingers scrambling to get a hold of it. He pulls it out and smooths it between his fingers. "Big spender," he remarks, smiling crookedly up at Jin. "Am I supposed to strip or something?"  
  
"Yeah," Jin says, and tugs at the waist of Kamenashi's clothes. His fingers brush warm belly. He wonders if Kamenashi can see his blush. "Take it off, baby."  
  
Kamenashi just laughs and shoves the note in the back pocket of his jeans.  
  
They go to the ramen joint around the corner. Jin orders them two huge bowls if steaming ramen, "extra meat", and a plate of gyoza. He takes pleasure in watching the blissful look on Kamenashi's face as he slurps down the first mouthful of noddles. They'll have to do this more often.  
  
They eat quietly for a while, the meal punctuated only by the loud slurping of the noodles and the hum of the other customers. Kamenashi examines every slice of beef before he eats it, eyes closing in pleasure as his teeth tear into the flesh. Jin wishes he could being him here every day.  
  
"Do I have to call you Kamenashi?" Jin asks out of nowhere; he'd not even really been aware he was about to ask himself.  
  
Kamenashi glances at him and then drops his eyes back to his bowl of noodles; sparsely populated, now, bits of mushroom floating free in a sea of miso. "Like, what else would you call me?" he asks finally.  
  
"I don't know," Jin says. "Kazuya?"  
  
Kamenashi is silent for a long time, until Jin says, feeling wounded. "It's no big deal," Jin says. "I didn't mean to be..." he searches for the word, but it feels ridiculous, like something a character in a Kimura Takuya drama might say. "Forward..." he finishes awkwardly.  
  
Kamenashi looks at him and licks his lips. "It's not that," he says. "Nobody calls me that. It doesn't even feel like me."  
  
Jin bites his lip, then says, "Not even your parents?"  
  
Kamenashi looks resolutely down, and then shrugs, noncommital.  
  
Jin's heart hurts. "Best friends call each other by name," he says stubbornly. "It's how you know you're special."  
  
Kamenashi doesn't reply, but his eyes look moist and his lip is trembling. Manly, Jin thinks, then says, "I'll call you Kame."  
  
-  
  
They start practicing songs together in the park after everyone has gone home, the volume on Jin's keyboard turned right down low so the neighbours don't complain. Jin makes Kame learn all his favourite R&B songs, including the hip hop intros. Kame is a terrible rapper but it makes Jin laugh hysterically to hear him try. Jin doesn't know why Kame indulges him. He sits there stumbling through monologues about his bitches and hos, hands bouncing and flicking to the beat. His movements are too graceful and his tongue too clumsy.  
  
Jin teaches him some of the songs he has written, secretly. He composed them in his room with his headphones on, abruptly stopping whenever his mother came in as if she had just caught him watching porn.  
  
Kame helps him with the lyrics. He is surprisingly sentimental and Jin's songs become littered with lines about sunsets and persevering through hardship amongst the sexual innuendo and whoreish moaning.  
  
Jin makes Kame do the whoreish moaning, too, choking when the first hum leaves his throat.  
  
Kame scowls at him, thankfully mistaking his response for laughter. "I'm not gonna do this if you're just gonna make fun of me," he grumbles.  
  
Jin goes home that night and dreams about it, what those moans would feel like puffing against his neck. In his dream they're just lying together in Jin's single bed. His hands are doing something mysterious beneath the sheets; even in his dream he doesn't really know what that would be. He wakes panting, the words on his lips already half-forgotten.  
  
It's becoming clear that he has some kind of weird gay crush on Kame.  
  
After that, he avoids Kame for days.  
  
-  
  
"What are you doing here?" Sawada asks when Jin shows up on his doorstep at 7pm on Thursday night. He is wearing sweats and a worn out Linkin Park t-shirt.  
  
"It's Thursday," Jin says. "I always come over on Thursdays."  
  
"Sure you did," Sawada says. "Before you met that kid."  
  
He stands aside and lets Jin in anyway.   Jin tries to count back the weeks since he last came here, but realises he can't; every Thursday for as long as he can remember has been spent hanging out with Kame eating candy and writing songs. Just like every other day.  
  
"Guess I missed my good friend Sawada," Jin says and pokes him in the cheek. Once, he might have said his best friend Sawada, more out of habit than anything else. They've known each other since they were little kids, growing up through pre-school and elementary school, junior high and high school. When they were kids they were friends because they both loved Dragonball. Now they're friends just because they are.  
  
Jin walks into the living room where a bunch of guys are sitting around watching tv; some anime Jin doesn't recognize with lots of robots and explosions. They are drinking beer that someone must have stolen from their parents. Hiroki hands Jin a can as he sits down.  
  
"What have you been up to, man?" he says.  
  
"Not much," Jin says, thinking of Kame's voice and his teasing smile and his cubby house. "Same old."  
  
Jin tries to be normal and hang out with the guys like always, making the same old jokes about hot girls and boobs and soccer players, but after a while he finds himself staring out the window, wondering what Kame is getting up to without him.  
  
-  
  
On the fifth night that Jin doesn't see Kame, he goes to bed early out of boredom and wakes with a start to the stark clap of thunder. His heart pounds with terror and it takes him a moment to comprehend why; he's staring at the red numbers on his alarm clock that tell him it is almost midnight when his brain catches up with his body and he scrambles out of bed. He grabs an umbrella and jams his feet in his sneakers as he runs out the door.  
  
It's only a few minutes' run, but he is soaked through by the time he runs through the school gates. His hair is heavy and cold as ice and his shoes squelch in his shoes. Lightning cracks overhead as he skids to a stop by the cubby house.  
  
Kame is sitting inside wide awake. The blanket Jin left him is over his head like a cloak, rather inefficiently shielding him from the fat drops of rain that fall through the cracks in the corrugated plastic roof.  
  
Kame jumps when Jin appears, rearing back and clutching his blanket over his face in a shaking fist, as if the dripping fleece can protect him from the monster advancing in the dark.  
  
"Kame," Jin says, reaching to pull the blanket away from his face. "It's just me."  
  
The blanket goes still for a minute before Kame peeks out, brow rumpled with confusion. They stare at each other and Jin waits for Kame to ask how he found him, but he doesn't.  
  
"Come on," Jin says, and holds out his hand.  
  
-  
  
They run the whole way home.  Jin discards the umbrella after the wind breaks its arms and then it is just them and the torrential downpour. Kame never lets go of his hand.  
  
Jin's mother is waiting in the kitchen when they let themselves in. She is wearing Jin's father's dressing gown and devouring a bag of potato chips; she eats when she is stressed.  
  
They drip puddles on the floor as she yells at Jin and hits him around the ears. Kame looks down with slightly bowed shoulders as she hollers, flinching slightly in time with her shattering voice.  
  
"This is Kame," Jin says when she has finished. "He's going to stay here tonight."  
  
"You boys are soaking," she tuts. "Go run a bath before you both die of hypothermia, Jin."  
  
Jin kisses her cheek as he passes. He strips off his shirt and drops it on the bathroom floor with a wet plop. He flips the taps and pours some bubble bath into the tub; it his mother’s and it smells like cherries, but Jin likes the way it feels when he squelches the bubbles into his skin.  
  
He turns around and Kame is standing at the door, clutching a bright orange towel and looking a bit bewildered.  
  
“Your mother said we should share,” he says. His hair is sticking to his scalp and curling around his neck. He looks like a drowned chihuahua. He steps inside the room. “I can just wait, if you want...”  
  
“You’ll freeze,” Jin says, shaking his head. “It’s no big deal,” he adds, feigning nonchalance, even though his heart beat picks up a little at the thought of peeling Kame’s wet t-shirt away from his pale skin.  
  
Kame nods and slides the door closed behind them. Steam fills the room and eases the slight ache of Jin’s muscles as he slides his pyjama pants off and steps into the bath. The water is deep enough to reach his shoulders and he pulls his knees up to his chest to leave Kame some room. He tries not to watch as Kame slowly eases his soaked hoodie over his head, but he has time to note the line of Kame’s waist as it slopes into almost womanly hips. He’s so thin that it makes Jin hurt.  
  
He averts his gaze as Kame steps into the bath and sits down opposite him. It’s a big bath but their knees still knock, bones rubbing through their skin. The hot water slowly thaws their frozen muscles.  
  
Jin picks up the loofah from the side of the bath and slowly draws it over his elbows to break up the awkward silence. Kame watches him, so Jin slides the loofah up his arm and over his shoulder. Kame shivers and then says, “You knew?” Jin can feel his toes flexing where they brush against Jin’s own. “About me?”  
  
Jin shrugs. “Sort of.” He abandons he loofah and rests his chin on his knees. “I know you live in that cubby, but I don’t know why.”  
  
Kame’s jaw flexes. “How long have you known?”  
  
“A while,” Jin says.  
  
“You never said anything,” Kame says, a note of disbelief lifting his voice and making it a little whiny.  
  
Jin shrugs again. “I thought you’d tell me,” he says. “Eventually.”  
  
Kame smiles crookedly. “As if,” he says. “You can’t keep a secret.”  
  
“Can too,” Jin says, and splashes him with water. “I kept this one for ages.”  
  
Kame nudges him with his knee. Jin nudges back a bit and his knee slips so it’s trapped between both of Kame’s. Kame’s skin is slippery and slick. “Thanks,” Kame says. His cheeks are a furious, blotchy pink; Jin doesn’t know if it is from the hot water or sheer embarrassment. “For bringing me here.”  
  
“I was worried about the lightning,” Jin says.  
  
“Well,” Kame says. “Thanks for worrying.”  
  
They share Jin’s single bed that night because it’s too late and Jin’s too tired to pull the futon out from the cupboard in Reio’s room. He lends Kame a pair of old pajama pants covered in the batman logo; they’re a little too big and Kame has to tie the drawstring tight. He is a hot, bony presence in Jin’s bed, all elbows and arms in Jin’s stomach. He is restless and fidgety, tossing and turning and driving Jin crazy. He flinches awake at every slight noise; the rustling of the sheets or the compressor in the fridge starting to hum. His shoulders are tense and hard until Jin finally wraps his arms around him from behind and murmurs softly at his ear.  
  
Kame clutches Jin's wrist, and finally, he sleeps.  
  
-  
  
The next day is Saturday, and they spend it sitting at the kotatsu playing cards. Reio joins in and Kame teaches them an infuriating game called Cheat that Jin keeps losing. Eventually, he refuses to play anymore until they switch to Texas Hold 'Em poker. He loses that too, but they keep on playing until he wins.  
  
Jin's mother keeps bringing them snacks. Jin can tell she is horrified by the stark jut of Kamenashi's collarbones where they spear out of the v-neck of his borrowed t-shirt. Kame obediently eats everything she brings him; onigiri and miso soup, curry pan, mochi and  three or four chocolate bars she must have retrieved from her secret stash. She makes them a big lunch which they devour in seconds. Reio stares at all the food as if they're all insane.  
  
"Your mum is pretty," Kame says when she goes into the kitchen to get them some juice. "She looks like you."  
  
Jin flushes at the indirect compliment.  
  
His mum pulls Jin aside later and interrogates him about where Kame has been living, lips pursing in consternation when Jin tells her about following Kame to the cubby; about how that has been going on for months.  
  
"You should have said something before now," she says. "What were you doing, waiting for him to collapse from malnutrition?"  
  
Jin shifts sheepishly from foot to foot; he hates it when his mother thinks he's an idiot. She's usually the only person that doesn't. "I thought you'd call in child services or something," he says. "He's got his reasons for not wanting to go home."  
  
"What are they, Jin?" she puts her hands on his shoulders. "Maybe we can help him."  
  
"I don't know," Jin says. "But he does."  
  
-  
  
Jin insists that Kame stay again that night. They've spent all night watching baseball with Jin's dad; they leave him snoring on the couch and roll out the futon on the floor beside Jin's bed. They stretch out the blankets; they are Jin's from when he was a little kid and are covered in trucks and robots.  
  
Kame crawls inside and buries his head gratefully into the pillow. Jin lies in bed and looks down at him in the light that streams in from the neon sign outside. Kame's sharp cheekbones cut into icy blue light. Jin closes his eyes.  
  
-  
  
Kame says, "I'm not a runaway."  
  
Jin isn't sure if he has been sleeping; he feels heavy and confused and when he opens his eyes he realises that a couple of hours have passed since they went to bed. The neon has been cut and the only light comes from the little red numbers on Jin's alarm clock. He can't make out the lines of Kame's body.  
  
Kame tells him his story in the dark.  
  
-  
  
When Kamenashi was barely three years old, he lived in a house in the suburbs with his parents and his two older brothers. His father was a salaryman and his mother was a housewife. He has vague memories of the sounds of their voices and the way they moved, the musty cigarette smell of his father and the egg-smell of the stuff his mother used to set her hair.  
  
They were killed in a car crash when they were taking his second-eldest brother to the dentist. Kame doesn't remember this, but he has been told. His brother died instantly. His mother lingered on life support for days. His father, somewhere in between.  
  
There was no-one to look after the Kamenashi children; one surviving grandparent, too senile and too poor. They had been put into the foster system, where they were supposed to stay together. Somehow, they didn't. Kame isn't too clear on the details.  
  
He has lived in twenty-two foster homes since he was three years old. Some were better than others.  
  
The last three were really bad.  
  
-  
  
"He wanted to adopt me," Kame says. His voice is thick and a bit husky. "He said, 'You'll be Kurosawa Kazuya now' and I had to get out. I had to. I mean, who IS that?" Jin hears his breathing hitch. "My brother won't come looking for Kurosawa Kazuya."  
  
Jin doesn't know what to say; Reio has been such a constant source of irritation in his life that Jin can't imagine him being the source of longing like he hears in Kame's voice, but he suddenly feels like going into Reio's room and checking just to make sure he's still there.  
  
"Your family is so nice," Kame says after a while, and when Jin hears the crack in his voice he slips out of his bed and onto Kame's futon, inelegantly tripping and tumbling in the blankets. He ends up uncomfortably squashed around Kame's legs, arms around him and head in his lap.  
  
Tomorrow, they'll both pretend they didn't cry.  
  
-  
  
Jin has school on Monday morning. He reluctantly leaves Kame sitting at the kitchen table, eating rice and letting Jin's mother fuss over him. He's not sure why he's so reluctant to leave, only that it feels like if he walks out the door and shuts it behind him without looking back, then Kame is going to slip away from him.  
  
He is distracted and jumpy all day, moreso even than usual. He watches the clock in his classes and doodles words in English in the margins of his notebooks; honey, lover, fighter, wolf. He doesn’t even pay attention in history, which he usually likes because the teacher Yamada-san is pretty and sometimes puts her hand on your shoulder and smiles when you’ve done a good job.  
  
He is out the door almost before the bell has even rung, barely even stopping to grab his things from his locker. He doesn’t bother stopping at home for his keyboard, just rushes straight to the station. He half expects to explode into the square and find it empty. As if Kame might just skip town now that Jin knows some of his secrets.  
  
Kame is just sitting there, though, same as always, bent over his guitar and tapping his toes in time with the beat. He is playing SMAP and laughing a little at the middle aged women who giggle and dance around him, twirling in their high-waisted mum clothes. Jin can hear his voice shake with giggles. He nods in response to Jin’s wave.  
  
Jin stands by Kame’s guitar case and watches as he plays. There is a bento box sitting beside Kame’s backpack that Jin recognises as his mother’s. It is pale yellow and covered in tiny cartoon zebra.  
  
Kame’s singing has gotten better; his voice has changed in the few months since Jin has known him, getting a little huskier and deeper, losing the slight chipmunkiness that Jin hadn’t even realised had been there originally. Jin whistles as Kame closes up the song and thanks the women for their time.  
  
"Where's your keyboard?" Kame asks. By the looks of the coins scattered in the base of his cap, it's been a quiet day.  
  
"Left it at home," Jin shrugs. "Figured you could play for me."  
  
Kame grunts his assent, looking up at Jin beneath a hand shielding his eyes from the sun. "I've never seen you in school uniform before."  
  
Jin purses lips, shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot; conscious, suddenly, that he probably looks like a total nerd. He runs his hands through his hair to mess it up and undoes the first few buttons on his jacket and shirt, revealing the black tank top beneath.  
  
"Kakkoii," Kame says through the side of his mouth; his pick is lodged firmly in the other side. Jin stammers even though Kame is mocking him, but Kame just ignores him and begins to tune his guitar.  
  
He stole that guitar from his foster father when he ran away. It was one of dozens, but this was his crowning glory, the jewel in his collection. It had belonged to some famous Spanish singer neither Jin nor Kame had ever heard of; renowned in the sixties for his intricate guitar solos. Kame's foster father had bought it at an auction for a fortune. Kame says he would probably kill him to get it back. If he ever finds him.  
  
The story surprised Jin, because Kame never seemed the type to steal, especially something so personal and valuable like that. When Jin asked him about it, all Kame said was, “He deserved it.”  
  
Jin shivers.  
  
“So,” Kame says, abandoning the tuning forks, apparently happy. “What are we playing?”  
  
Jin sits at his side, as close as the drum of the guitar will allow. “I thought,” he starts shyly, then stops.  
  
“What?” Kame asks. He leans over a little so that he can peer into Jin’s face; Jin is refusing to look at him.  
  
“Maybe we could play some of our stuff,” Jin says. For a minute, he hopes that Kame refuses; he is filled with the image of the passing crowd suddenly stopping to boo them, polite Japanese faces contorted with derision.  
  
Kame just nods, businesslike, and says, “Ok.”  
  
They play their songs, Jin singing and Kame strumming his guitar; joining in as a backup singer occasionally, but mostly silent. The people streaming out of the station mostly ignore them but a few stop and drop coins in their collection, tapping their feet to the beat. Some of the songs have lyrics only half-written; Jin fills the gaps with nonsense words in English, some cursing and sha la las. A few times, he sings dumb words like ‘envelope’ or ‘calendar’ and holds them on slow, soulful notes just because he likes the way they sound.  
  
The girls that seem to come see him every day hold each other’s hands and cry. There is one that Jin has come to realise is ‘Kamenashi’s Fan’. Whenever Kame flicks his hair out of his eyes she trembles with delight.  
  
At the end of the evening they empty the coins into their laps and Jin is a bit enraged to realise that they’ve only taken about half of their usual cash; he knows he should have expected it (the punters like what they know) but it still blindsides him a bit. He and Kame were fucking awesome. These people don’t even know what they’ve just seen. History in the making.  
  
“One day we’ll hold lives and people will pay scalpers thousands of dollars for tickets,” Jin says as Kame counts out the coins and divides them by two. “All these people will be begging to come see us.”  
  
Jin expects Kame to laugh at him, but he doesn’t. “Alright, superstar,” he says with a scrunched up smile. “Let’s make that a promise.”  
  
They buy cans of vending machine coffee and sit in the square making plans for their first tour, which grows and grows until it’s a sell-out arena tour with shows in every major city in the world. Jin wants to start in LA, but Kame is insisting on London; they will record their breakout album, he says, in the studios at Abbey Road.  
  
Reio comes down at about 9:30 and says, “Mum says you have to come home now.” He is wearing a bright red hoodie and a pair of sneakers that can’t possibly be his actual size.  
  
Kame smiles at Jin, a firm, brave grin. “See you,” he says, and it hurts more this time than it has every other time he’s let Kame sit here on his own in the dark.  
  
“Kame--” he starts, but Reio interrupts.  
  
His voice is sheepish, hands stuffed inside his pockets all balled up and fidgety. He looks at Kame and says, “Mum says you have to come too.”  
  
-  
  
Jin’s mother takes Kame for a drive. They are gone for two hours; Jin sits in his room trying to concentrate on his homework, 2 _cos_ (3 _x_ – 1) = 0, but all he can think about is where they are and what they’re doing. What his mother is saying to Kame. When they will be home.  
  
The equations blur on the page. They make little enough sense at the best of times, but right now it’s like staring at an alien language. He emails his mother’s phone, _Where are you?_ but she never replies.  
  
When they return a little after midnight, she says, “Kazuya is going to stay with us for a little while.”

-

Kame enrols in Jin’s school. Jin is in his third and final year of high school, doing his best to coast toward graduation without crashing. He promised his mother he would get that high school diploma, and then he can do whatever he likes.  
  
Kame is a first year. Jin has no idea how he gained admission to the school; it’s not one of the fancy private schools full of brainiacs, or anything, but Kame hasn’t been to school since he was thirteen years old. Jin thinks his father might have pulled some strings, but he has no idea where, or how. Jin’s father occupies a murky world full of guys who owe him a favour. Jin wonders what favours the principal owes him.  
  
It’s weird, because Jin has always seen Kame as being so much smarter than him, but he really struggles with schoolwork. Some nights they sit in Jin’s room, huddled over his desk, and Jin tries to help him with his homework, but it becomes clear that Kame has missed too much and needs the kind of help that Jin just isn’t smart enough to give.  
  
Cram school is expensive - Jin’s parents wouldn’t have been able to afford to send Jin, even if Jin had had the inclination to go - so Jin’s mother arranges for their upstairs neighbour to help Kame out three days a week, in return for help with her chores. She’s an old lady who used to be a substitute teacher. She’s always giving Jin dried fruit when she sees him in the hall.  
  
At first, Jin is pleased that Kame is going to get the help he needs, but it quickly becomes clear that the help he needs is going to take up all the time that he used to spend with Jin. Three days a week becomes five, and he comes home from Ishida-san’s tutorial sessions tired and a bit cranky. Kame does not like to be bad at things, and it seems he is bad at almost everything school-related. He looks miserably at Jin whenever he hesitantly enquires after his progress, then pulls out an exercise book and starts revising his notes.  
  
“I wish I wasn’t so dumb,” he says, lying on his back on his futon, gazing up at the book he’s holding up over his head.  
  
“You’re not dumb,” Jin says. “You’ve just got a lot of catching up to do.”  
  
Kame sighs. “It’s so boring, though. I just want to catch up already so I can move on to something more interesting.”  
  
“Hang in there,” Jin says. “If I can pass, anyone can, right?”  
  
In the afternoons, Jin plays at the station alone.  
  
-  
  
On Sundays, Ishida visits her daughter’s family for lunch and Jin gets Kame to himself for the whole day. They sit around Jin’s room, Kame lying on his back with his eyes closed and barking out criticisms of the songs Jin is composing; the tempo is too slow or the notes are too flat, the lyrics are vapid, he’s singing like a woman or not singing enough like a woman. Jin would be offended except that Kame seems to have taken it as a complete matter of solid, reliable fact that Jin’s songs are good enough that they are going to make them famous. That Jin is good enough to make them famous.  
  
Jin’s noticed that since moving in, Kame has become kind of bratty; not with Jin’s parents, or with Reio, of course. With them he is a well behaved darling. Jin’s mother’s perfect new son. He says please and thank you and tells her every meal is delicious. He let her cut his hair a bit so that he looked neat and presentable, a little angel carved out of the wild haired boy he had been.  
  
With Jin, he’s more like a spoiled toddler; sometimes rude or abrupt, but mostly just demanding - just demanding Jin’s time or attention, half of his Snickers bar or coffee. Sometimes just demanding that Jin do his best. Jin doesn’t mind. This is a side of himself that only Jin is trustworthy enough to see.  
  
“What are we going to name our band?” Kame asks one day. He’s wearing one of Jin’s old t-shirts. A few days after he moved in Jin went through his clothes and gave Kame everything that didn’t fit him right anymore or that he doesn’t really wear; a few things that he just thought would look good on him. He gave Kame his old prized leather jacket that has become too narrow in the shoulders and Kame wears it all the time, the same way Jin used to. It’s weird to see Kame in his clothes, but kind of nice.  
  
“I don’t know,” Jin says. “Something awesome, obviously.”  
  
“Obviously,” Kame says. He picks up the big stuffed dinosaur Jin has had forever and makes it dance on his lap. “But what??”  
  
Jin hits a few keys on his keyboard, listening to the notes. “HELL RANGERS...” he says after a minute, scowling when Kame rolls his eyes and says, “Lame.”  
  
“You think of something, then,” Jin huffs.  
  
Kame flops back on the bed. The dinosaur is still dancing, bouncing from leg to leg on Kame’s flat stomach. “I can’t think of anything,” Kame says after a while. “I’m not good at this stuff.”  
  
“Me either,” Jin admits. He picks up his English dictionary and lies down on the bed next to Kame, propped up on his elbows. “I’m going to choose two words in here at random, and no matter what, that’s our name, ok?”  
  
Kame looks skeptical, but agrees anyway. He rolls onto his side and props his head up on his hand, waiting. His knees rub against Jin’s thigh.  
  
“PORCUPINE...” Jin says, then flips to a different page. “MAVERICK...”  
  
Kame purses his lips. “I don’t know what either of those words mean,” he says, “but they both sound stupid.”  
  
Jin sighs and tries again. “TOWELLING BLAB,” he says.  
  
“Oricon Chart toppers TOWELLING BLAB,” Kame says. “I don’t see it.”  
  
Jin makes a face and turns the page. “DANCE PIRATE.”  
  
“DANCE PIRATE,” Kame repeats. “That could work.”  
  
“Worldwide chart toppers DANCE PIRATE,” Jin says.  
  
“DANCE PIRATE sold out show,” Kame says.  
  
“DANCE PIRATE triple platinum,” Jin giggles.  
  
“Grammy award winners DANCE PIRATE,” Kame says.  
  
Jin hugs his dictionary to his chest. “We’re gonna be filthy rich.”  
  
-  
  
Kame settles into life with the Akanishi family fairly easily, until it becomes difficult for Jin to remember that there was ever a time when he woke up in the morning and looked down at the floor and just saw tatami, rather than Kame sleeping on the futon, his unruly hair sticking out over the blankets.  
  
A few months pass, and Jin notices that Kame has grown a bit; a bit taller, a bit broader, quite a bit more handsome. Jin’s mother’s cooking has filled in the ugly crevices where his bones used to jut out with smooth, healthy flesh; you can now only see the faint outline of ribs when he takes his shirt off. His frail wrists have become thick and competent. Jin stares at them whenever Kame plays his guitar.  
  
It becomes clear that Kame has made friends in school, a development by which Jin is alternately thrilled and infuriated. The theory of it is fine; Kame making friends with some slightly nerdish classmates, just because they are sitting next to him in class and it would be boring to sit through all your classes alone.  
  
The actuality is harder to deal with; a group of good looking young kids - some GIRLS even - who stroll out of class giggling and too familiar. They stare at Jin reverently when he meets Kame by the school gates; if they speak to him, they address him as “Akanishi-senpai” with slightly hushed voices. Kame just calls him “Jin”.  
  
Every day, they ask Kame to go some place with them, usually to karaoke or a game centre, occasionally to go shopping in one of the fancy, trendy districts nearby. Kame always says no, because he has tutoring. Jin always wonders what he would say if he didn’t have tutoring; if he would go with them or if he would choose to stick with Jin and go play golden oldies for strangers at the train station. Jin likes to think Kame would choose him. He’s pretty sure. Sometimes, he looks at their shiny, happy faces and wonders if going to karaoke with them for a few hours would help Kame to forget everything in a way that hanging out with Jin, with that intense intimacy that seems to be growing up around them, can never do.  
  
It’s a moot point anyway. The way things are going, Kame’s going to be going to those tutor sessions for the rest of their natural lives.  
  
-  
  
They are sitting on the floor in Jin's bedroom watching some stupid variety show when stupid Yamashita Tomohisa comes on. He is standing with Takizawa and talking about his stupid group's upcoming concerts. Jin thinks he has a dumb, ugly face.  
  
"I auditioned," Jin blurts out. "For Johnny's."  
  
Kame cracks up. "You did not," he says. "No way."  
  
"I did!" Jin insists. "When I was fourteen! They said I wasn't obedient enough." He gets up and takes a box out of the cupboard, scrambling through it to get to the bottom. He takes out a little piece of laminated card and gives it to Kame. "Look, I stole their number plate."  
  
Kame stares down at it; it is yellow and about the size of a CD. The number 76 is printed on it in a thick, cartoonish font. The Johnny's Jr logo is stamped on the bottom in red.  
  
"Is this why you hate Johnnys?" Kame asks. He indicates the wall behind them, Jin's gallery of posters torn out of his ex-girlfriend's Myojo and then defaced; every now and again, when he's in a really bad mood, he'll get us and add another bushy eyebrow or pustulating zit to some ugly kid's face with a permanent marker.  
  
"I hate them because they're so lame," Jin insists.  
  
Kame just smiles and says, "We'll make them regret the day they ever rejected Akanishi Jin."  
  
-  
  
Jin finishes school without much fanfare; he barely passed most of his classes and didn't even try to get into university. He takes a job working at a trendy Harajuku clothing store, where the manager always positions him close to the entrance where he can lure in the girls with his pretty face.  
  
The job makes it hard to keep busking in the afternoons, because he is now one of those suckers commuting home during the evening rush. He usually arrives home at about seven o'clock, just in time to meet Kame on his way downstairs from his tutoring.  
  
Their fangirls have noticed their absence and have started leaving little tributes to them in the space where they used to play. Jin passes them on his way home from worm; tiny wreathes with grainy paparazzi style photos laminated in the centre; their names and the dates and 'live together, die together' scrawled on the bottom in wavering red ink. Jin gets the feeling the girls think they died in some kind of romantic suicide pact.  
  
He almost doesn't want to disappoint them with the knowledge that he is alive, just working a dead end 9 to 6 job that would be unbearable if not for all the awesome free clothes he gets.  
  
When he finally shows up to play again, it is a Sunday and he and Kame do a low key set to try out some of the new songs they have been writing; mostly low key ballads about love and loss and perseverence, more Kame's style than Jin's own.  
  
They have been talking this whole time about being awesome and getting famous, but that day is the first time that Jin really knows it is true. While they play a kind of momentous hush falls over the half dozen or so people that have gathered around them; it takes a beat or two for the applause to start, a shocked silence as if people can't really believe what they have heard.  
  
Yoshida-san, who runs the newsstand nearby and has been watching over Jin since he first started playing here as a scrawny, stupid kid, has tears in her eyes. She drops a few coins in their collection plate and says, "You boys."  
  
Jin bows deeply and says, "Thank you for looking after us."  
  
She blushes deeply and says it again. "You boys."  
  
-  
  
Kame shows up at home one day a few hours later than Jin expects him with neatly brushed hair and skin pink and tender looking where his eyebrows have been plucked to within an inch of their lives. The difference in his face is striking; smooth, high cheekbones rising up and his eyes suddenly popping sparkling and dark. He blushes and tries to shield his brow with his hands when Jin grabs his face and tries to hold him still to examine him in the light.  
  
"I got a job," he says. "They did this to me."  
  
"A job WHERE?" Jin asks, trying not to let the whine he feels in his chest spill out too obviously; the only time Kame has in which to get a job is the time he usually spends with Jin.  
  
Kame mumbles his response and Jin has to ask him to repeat himself.  
  
"A schoolboy cafe," Kame huffs. He crosses his arms and lifts his chin at the mixed incredulity and hilarity he must see on Jin's face. "It was the only place that would take me," he says defensively. "I can't freeload off your parents forever."  
  
"Sure you can,” Jin says. “It’s better than prostituting yourself to old perverts!”  
  
“I’m not a _prostitute_ ,” Kame hisses. “I’m not even a host! I’m basically just a glorified bus boy.”  
  
“A bus boy in SCHOOLBOY COSPLAY,” Jin says, hilarity finally getting the better of him, giggles bursting forth.  
  
“It’s not cosplay,” Kame says primly. “I am a schoolboy.”  
  
“Do you have a persona?” Jin asks.  
  
Kame scowls, but then suddenly his face changes and he looks up at Jin, all shy through his lashes. “C-can I take your plate, Akanishi-senpai?” he stutters, mouth slightly pouty and pursed. “Please?”  
  
All the blood rushes out of Jin’s brain and he chokes, “Jesus.”  
  
“Yeah,” Kame says darkly, obviously misinterpreting the source of Jin’s reticence. “Anyway, I start on Monday.”  
  
-  
  
Kame works almost every night, usually late into the night, much to Jin’s mother’s - and Jin’s - consternation. It gets to the point where Jin only sees Kame for a few minutes a day, their brief passing in the kitchen in the mornings and the moment when Kame crawls into bed at night and Jin lifts his head to murmur a sleepy, “Okaeri.”  
  
Jin is forced to find ways to fill his time; he starts going out to the clubs in Roppongi with a few of his better-looking coworkers. He loves clubbing; dark rooms with bright lights, foreigners in skimpy clothing and beer so cold and frothy it burns his throat. He loves doing shots with strangers, ending up dancing close and sweaty, grinding skin on skin. More than anything, he loves to dance.  
  
Sometimes, he’ll pick up a girl and go back to her place and fool around a little bit. It never goes much further than that; he sleeps with a couple of them and in the moment it is so hot and so worth it, but he feels strangely violated after. In the sticky moments afterwards he pulls on his clothes and slips out the door with a muttered excuse, thinking, mostly, about how this is a secret he can never share with Kame. It’s not worth the trauma to sleep with them, but sometimes he can get away with a blowjob with only the slightest feelings of guilt.  
  
One night, he is pursued by an aggressive guy fresh off the plane from Los Angeles; he resists, at first, but finds himself in the guy’s hotel room after hours of vodka and dancing. His name is Jason and he has brown hair and green eyes. He pushes Jin down on the bed and kisses him without even showering first, and it’s kind of awkward and uncomfortable until Jin thinks, _Is this what it would be like with Kame?_  
  
At that thought, he surges against him, hands in his hair, feeling hotter and more needy all of a sudden. It’s the best sex he has ever had, but later he can’t even remember what Jason looks like.  
  
-  
  
Sundays are their day. Jin typically crawls out of bed around noon, grumpy and hungover, and sits at the table while Kame finishes up his homework. Sometimes Kame gets sick of waiting for him and comes in and wakes him up with a mug of coffee, holding it out of his reach until Jin give in and sits up, usually slumped against Kame’s shoulder.  
  
Sometimes they just sit around the house, playing music or cards, but often Jin will borrow his father’s car and drive them out of the city, into the mountains or to a long, flat stretch of beach. Jin likes to sing off the side of the mountain and hear his voice echoing in the canyon below. Kame likes to wade into the water with his jeans rolled up, not stopping until the waves are lapping at his knees. He’ll stand and stare at Jin until Jin wades out to meet him, and they’ll scream their frustrations to the sea.  
  
Sometimes, in those moments, Jin considers kissing him. He’ll look at him askance and see the adult lines forcing themselves out onto Kame’s boyish face and think, _I’m going to_ , but then he’ll remember that Kame is family, now. That if he fucks this up the way he fucks everything up, then he is basically destroying the only family that Kame has ever known.  
  
He loves him too much to ever see that happen.  
  
-  
  
Jin meets Pi on a Thursday night. He’s somehow talked his way into the VIP section and Yamashita is sitting there surrounded by a group of laughing, glamourous boys. He looks bored, staring into his drink and fiddling with the straw. He smiles weakly when prompted by the squinty eyed one to his left. He looks different in real life, the lines of his face sharper and more tired. Something about him reminds Jin of Kame; the slight wariness with which they look at the world.  
  
He sees him briefly, and then forgets about him, caught up in conversation with an American girl with long blonde hair who asks him questions in broken Japanese and laughs at his confused responses. Jin only remembers he is even there when he goes to order a drink and Yamashita slips in front of him, asking for a fancy European beer.  
  
“Hey,” Jin protests, “No cutsies!”  
  
Yamashita turns and blinks at him owlishly, seeming surprised that Jin was even standing there in the first place. “Excuse me?” he says after a full minute, as if he has been standing here trying to process the words Jin is saying but came up blank.  
  
“You cut in line,” Jin says.  
  
“I did not,” Yamashita says.  
  
“YOU DID TOO,” Jin says, louder this time.  
  
“I DID NOT,” Yamashita snaps.  
  
Somehow, by the end of the night, they are the best of friends.  
  
-  
  
“Pi says that this season is all about asymmetrical lines,” Jin says. He is sitting in Kame’s cafe sipping a milkshake and telling him all about his encounter with The Yamashita Tomohisa. Jin had no idea he cared so much about fashion, but he’s been talking to Kame about it for about two hours now and doesn’t think he’ll stop any time soon. Kame is only half listening to him, hmming appreciatively at the right intervals as he moves around the tables, gathering the women’s plates and flirting a little as he goes. Whenever he looks into some old woman’s eyes and she giggles Jin feels like reaching out and pushing her face into her strawberry cream tart.  
  
“He says if I cut my hair shorter on this side it would make my cheekbones pop more,” Jin says. “What do you think? He’s sooo much better looking in real life, you barely notice his googly eyes at all.”  
  
Kame turns around just in time for Jin to see him make a face, so he says, “What?”  
  
Kame shrugs and goes back to stacking the dishes on the counter for the dishwasher to come pick them up and take them into the kitchen.  
  
“Seriously,” Jin says, feeling, suddenly, hot under the collar. “What?”  
  
Kame has a pissy, shrivelled kind of look about the face that Jin rarely sees on him. He looks tightly wound, like all Jin has to do is poke at the right strings and he will explode.  
  
“You’ve been talking about Yamashita for hours,” Kame says. That’s unfair; Jin’s only been in here about forty five minutes, and he hadn’t talked about him for all of that time. Just most of it.  
  
“So?” Jin says.  
  
“So maybe I’m sick of hearing about fucking Yamashita,” Kame says.  
  
Jin storms out. Tomorrow is Sunday; Jin stays out all night and doesn’t come home until almost Monday morning.  
  
-  
  
Jin meets YamaPi for lunch on Wednesday afternoon, in a izakaya about halfway between their respective workplaces. They have to make it quick; Yamashita has to be back for a photoshoot in thirty minutes, and the t-shirts in Jin’s store won’t fold themselves.  
  
Jin tells Pi about Kame’s outburst.  
  
“It was so dumb,” Jin says. He shovels a piece of katsu in his mouth and talks through it. “I don’t know why he was acting like that.”  
  
Pi shrugs. “Maybe he was jealous,” he says. He’s got about five different dishes spread out around him, but he’s only taking bits and pieces from each.  
  
“What, that I met the famous Yamashita Tomohisa and he didn’t?” Jin asks. “Kame’s not that lame.”  
  
Pi rolls his eyes. “Not that you met me,” he says. “That I met you.”  
  
Jin blinks at him. “Why would that matter?” he asks.  
  
“I don’t know,” Pi says. “People are weird.”  
  
-  
  
Jin thinks about it all day while carefully folding jeans and counting out the change for the kids that come into the store. It has never really occurred to Jin that maybe Kame is as insane about Jin as he is about Kame; Kame tends to keep all his worst neuroses bottled up until they spill out uncontrolled and Jin finds out he’s a homeless orphan who ran away from a sadistic foster parent. Sometimes Jin forgets how messed up he really is inside because when he looks into Jin’s eyes he is stable and strong; he is the one dragging Jin forward, the one keeping them both afloat.  
  
It’s weird for Jin to remember that he’s just a kid like Jin.  
  
Jin tries to think about what he would do if Kame suddenly came into the store one afternoon and said he’d met some guy - not just some guy, _Yamashita Tomohisa_ for fuck’s sake - and then proceeded to talk about how awesome he was for forty five minutes without break. Jin would like to give himself some credit for maturity, but he can’t. He’d have a shit fit. He’d probably have only lasted about three minutes before he had a shit fit, actually.  
  
Well, fuck.  
  
-  
  
Jin goes home early that night so he can be there when Kame gets there. Kame does a double take in the doorway of the bedroom when he gets there; Jin is already lying in bed, doodling in a notepad. He has about five pages of possible logos for DANCE PIRATE.  
  
“You’re not going out tonight?” Kame asks, pulling off the tie of his schoolboy uniform. It’s not the same as his regular uniform; the cafe has a make believe school dress code. He looks tired.  
  
“Nah,” Jin says. “I didn’t feel like it.”  
  
“Because Yamashita’s not gonna be there?” Kame snipes, and Jin can see his cheeks turning pink even as he says it.  
  
“I don’t know if he’s gonna be there,” Jin says. “I wanted to be here.” He holds out the sketchbook to Kame. “Look.”  
  
Kame takes it, looking at him quizzically. He flips through the pages, smile growing shyly on his face. “Don’t give up your day job,” he says, but a few days later Jin sees that he has doodled one of the logos in the margins of his homework. It is a skull and crossbones with hearts for eyes. They will use that logo for the rest of their lives.  
  
-  
  
They play a show in the square not long before Christmas; they actually advertise it this time, putting up fliers around town their their photos and their logo, DANCE PIRATE written in huge, angular caps across the bottom. Their fans come back, and bring their friends. Groups of shoppers wander in, lured, people say later, by the photograph of the two handsome young men on the flier. It is the largest group they have ever assembled.  
  
YamaPi comes. He stands in back in a hat with flaps for ears and a pair of expensive sunglasses. Later, he comes up to Jin and says, “That was really good!”  
  
“Thanks,” Jin says with a broad smile. Kame bows slightly and stiffly; he’s met YamaPi two or three times but has yet to relax around him. Later, he’s always more clingy than usual, shadowing Jin all evening when he would usually wander off and do his own thing. Jin should probably put a stop to it, but honestly he kind of likes it.  
  
“Seriously,” Pi says. “I was trying to think of ways to politely avoid telling you you suck on the way over here, but that was actually good!”  
  
“Yeah,” Jin says. “We’re awesome.”  
  
“I’m shocked,” Pi says, pressing his fists to his cheeks. “I thought you were going to be terrible.”  
  
“Does this mean you’re my fan now?” Jin asks, only half joking. “Do you want my autograph?”  
  
“No way,” Pi says, punching him on the arm and throwing his arm over Kame’s shoulders. Jin sees Kame freeze with surprise. “I’m Kamenashi-chan’s fan. Kawaaaaaiiiiiiiiiiii.”  
  
“Hey,” Jin says. “Fuck you, I’m adorable.”  
  
“It’s alright,” Kame says, wriggling out from under Pi’s arm. “I’ll always be Jin’s fan.”  
  
“Yeah,” Jin says, yanking on Kame’s arm til he’s tucked at Jin’s side. “So there.”  
  
Pi just snickers and treats them yakiniku to celebrate; when they count up the money in Jin’s fedora they have made just enough to buy Jin’s mother a pearl necklace for Christmas.  
  
-  
  
At the end of his second year of high school, Kame’s grades have picked up and they’re now actually better than Jin’s; he has a B-minus average with a few C+’ and A’s scattered throughout. He brings home a history essay about Oda Nobunaga with an A+ written on the front in big red pen. Jin’s mother proudly sticks it on the fridge with a Doraemon magnet. She ruffles Kame’s hair and kisses his cheek and says, “My little genius!”  
  
“See?” Jin says as she goes into the other room. He bites into an apple and chews it obnoxiously while talking. “I told you you’re not dumb.”  
  
“It’s just an essay,” Kame says, eyes down.  
  
“Shut up,” Jin says. “I don’t think I ever got an A+ in my life.” He crosses the kitchen and pokes Kame in the arm. “Let me be vicariously smug.”  
  
Kame looks up at him and grins a bit shyly. Jin remembers him saying, “Akanishi-senpai, please?” and he can’t help it, he leans over and kisses him, a smacking, moist kiss.  
  
“Congratulations,” he murmurs into the side of Kame’s mouth, and then he’s out of there, only stopping long enough to pull his jacket on as he hurries out the door.  
  
-  
  
Neither of them mention the kiss later, though Jin thinks about it all the time. He remembers the way Kame’s eyebrows had lifted and his eyes had closed; how he’d blinked at Jin afterwards, as if unsure where he was. Jin thinks about it in the shower, in the train, at work while he’s writing mark downs on the price tags of t-shirts. He thinks about it lying in bed at night and while he’s chugging shots at the club. He thinks about it while writing songs and eating dinner.  
  
He thinks about it pretty much full time.  
  
-  
  
They celebrate Kame’s eighteenth birthday by driving up to the beach on a Friday night; they check into a ryokan and spend two days wandering the small coastal city, stuffing themselves with expensive seafood. It’s too cold to swim so they get massages and go to the onsen, where they float boneless and dizzy in the steaming water.  
  
They sleep side by side on futons, close enough to reach out and touch. Jin fantasises about reaching out and pulling Kame out of his futon and into his own. Wrapping him up in Jin’s blankets and not letting him go.  
  
On Sunday afternoon, when they get in the car to drive home, Kame clips his seatbelt into place and says to Jin, “You saved my life, you know.”  
  
-  
  
Kame starts acting a bit weird, and Jin thinks that he has finally started reacting to Jin’s clumsy, embarrassing kiss; he is on school holidays, so he should have plenty of time to come and hang around at Jin’s store in the mornings before he starts work in the afternoons, but he doesn’t. He sleeps in when Jin gets up for work and has already gone to bed when Jin gets home from Roppongi. Sometimes, Jin will turn the lights on and make a lot of noise, trying to wake Kame up so they can maybe go eat a midnight snack and watch a stupid American sitcom before Jin goes to sleep. A few times, he ‘accidentally’ trips over Kame’s leg’s on his way to the bed. Kame stays stubbornly, resolutely asleep, almost as if he’s faking.  
  
Jin misses him.  
  
He starts to text Kame a lot, at random moments throughout the day; Kame doesn’t really use his phone much, because he’s never gotten used to having one, but he replies to all Jin’s messages anyway. Sometimes he doesn’t say much, just responds to Jin’s questions with a yes or no answer. After a few days he seems to find the emoji function on his phone and embraces it to the point that Jin kind of wants to kill him; sometimes he doesn’t even bother responding with a ‘yes’ or ‘no’, just sends back a row of thumbs up.  
  
_Reply properly_ he sends, but all he gets back is a big red question mark.  
  
-  
  
Jin comes home from about a week into Kame’s school holidays and finds a note from Kame on top of his keyboard. It is written on a piece of notepaper hastily torn from one of Kame’s exercise books. Jin can till see bits of equations written on the torn side of the paper.  
  
_Gone to see my brother in Okinawa.  
  
I’ll call you  
  
Don’t worry  
  
Kame_  
  
He stares down at it, hand shaking; reads it three times, then explodes, “MUUUUUUM!”  
  
He dashes into the kitchen, where she is calmly folding wonton wrappers into gyoza. “He’ll be back, Jin.”  
  
“You KNEW about this?” he asks. The note is totally scrunched in his hand. “Why didn’t _I_ know about this?”  
  
“I suppose he thought you might react badly,” she says dryly.  
  
“What does he MEAN he’s gone to see his BROTHER?” Jin asks. He’s not even sure what he’s upset about exactly; he’s aware that he should probably see this as good news, but everything has suddenly changed really quickly and he’s not sure how to react. He feels like he’s blown a fuse.  
  
“He got a letter in the mail from his brother two or three days ago,” she says. “Calm down, honey. Come here, sit down and have some tea.” She ushers him over to the table and pours him a cup of tea from the pot that was gently steaming on the counter.  
  
“Don’t tell me to calm down,” Jin protests weakly.  
  
“Jin, really, there’s no need to be so dramatic,” she says. “He’ll be back.”  
  
Jin stares glumly into his cup of tea. He doesn’t believe her at all.  
  
-  
  
Kame calls him about half an hour later, moments after he has stepped off the plane. He’s sitting in the airport terminal waiting for his brother to pick him up; the tension coiled in his voice makes Jin’s tummy jerk. Jin hasn’t really seen him for a couple of days, which is the only way he could have hidden that slightly hysterical note from him.  
  
“You didn’t tell me you were going,” Jin says. He’s sitting on his bed staring at the pile of Kame’s stuff folded neatly on the end of the desk; three of four of his t-shirts, a pair of jeans, some balled up socks. The leather jacket Jin gave him is nowhere to be seen.  
  
“I couldn’t,” Kame says. “I don’t know why. I’m sorry.”  
  
Kame tells him that he got a letter from Kamenashi Yuichiro in the mail a few days ago, only his name is now Oda Yuichiro. He had been adopted as a small boy by a couple whose family owned a hospital in Okinawa; they are both doctors and are, from what Kame can tell from Googling their names, filthy rich. Yuichiro is in medical school, studying to be a trauma surgeon. He hired a private detective to find his missing brother Kazuya; he had been looking for years with no luck, until his name had turned up on the school records at a high school in suburban Tokyo. He’d sent Kame a boarding pass for a flight that was leaving today, all expenses paid. _Please come,_ he’d said. _Please._  
  
Jin is silent when Kame finishes, until Kame says, “Jin? Are you mad?”  
  
Jin is sitting on the bed with his head resting in his hand; the headache that had started out as a nuzzling tentacle at the back of his neck has become thick and overgrown, twining around his temple and yanking tight. “No,” he says finally.  
  
“Yes you are,” Kame says.  
  
“I’m just worried,” Jin says. “I wish I could have gone with you.”  
  
“I had to do this on my own,” Kame says. “You understand that, right?”  
  
“Yeah,” Jin says, but he doesn’t, at all.  
  
“I’m so nervous,” Kame says. Jin imagines him sitting in the airport in Okinawa with the suitcase he must have borrowed from Jin’s father, hunched over and biting a bit at his cuticles. “What if he doesn’t like me?”  
  
“What’s not to like?” Jin asks.  
  
Kame snorts. “I don’t know, according to most of my foster families, millions of things.”  
  
“Not according to this family,” Jin says, feeling, suddenly, fiercely loyal and protective. If this stupid brother doesn’t give Kame the family he has dreamed of and more, Jin is going to fly to Okinawa and kill him. Really, literally, kill him.  
  
“Thanks,” Kame says. “I should go. I’ll see you when I get back.”  
  
“Good luck,” Jin says, but what he thinks is, _you’re not coming back._  
  
-  
  
A few hours later, Kame sends a photo to his phone; his face pressed up against an imperfect replica of himself; quite a few years older and not quite so pretty, with bushier eyebrows and darker hair. They are grinning and throwing peace signs for the camera. Jin keeps taking out his phone to look at the picture; the naked, unbridled joy in Kame’s eyes.  
  
He falls asleep staring at it, wondering how it’s possible for him to feel so happy and so miserable all at once.  
  
-  
  
Kame calls him again first thing in the morning, when Jin is on his way to work, walking down the street with his satchel and take away coffee. He gushes about his brother and his adoptive parents and how beautiful their estate is, high up on a cliff overlooking the Okinawan coastline. Jin listens to him talk and closes his eyes and thinks, _iloveyouiloveyouiloveyouiloveyouiloveyouiloveyouiloveyouiloveyouiloveyou_ but it seems horribly, cruelly too late to tell him now, when he’s just found the thing he has been searching for all his life.  
  
-  
  
Jin goes out with some of Yamapi’s idol friends; a big group, all of them with precision cut hair and pointy crocodile skin shoes. There’s one kid that doesn’t really fit in, a bit older and a bit more awkward than the others. He’s got a big nose and hair that looks like a wig, but he laughs at all Jin’s dumb jokes and lets Jin bully him all evening. He and Jin sit in the corner of the room all evening making fun of the others.  
  
“You don’t seem like a Johnny,” Jin says. “No offense.”  
  
“Yeah, thanks,” the kid says. His name is Nakamaru Yuichi. “I think they keep me around for comic relief.”  
  
“You’d rather look like that?” Jin asks, gesturing towards a kid in white satin pants who is loitering by the bar awkwardly, looking like he wants Pi to notice him. His name is Shigeako or something. “At least your pants aren’t shiny.”  
  
Nakamaru snickers into his beer.  
  
Jin ends up telling him, in drunken, general terms, about the situation with Kame, only in this scenario Kame is a hot girl called Kazumi who ran off with a hot doctor, rather than Kazuya, his hot sort of foster brother who ran off with his biological brother. Somewhere in the middle, though, the two stories get confused and Jin just tells him everything, while Nakamaru sits there with a kind of stunned, awkward flare to his nostrils.  
  
Jin falls asleep on his shoulder, cheek pressed up against his white argyle sweater.  
  
“Thanks, Nakamura,” he murmurs sleepily.  
  
-  
  
Kame calls on Sunday afternoon when Jin is curled up under the covers, cuddling an icepack to his head. He feels dehydrated and distraught. He’s covered in bruises, but he doesn’t know where any of them came from. “Hi,” he says with a croaky voice; he went to karaoke with the Johnny’s in the middle of the night, and he seems to have been singing his heart out.  
  
“Hey,” Kame says. “Big night?”  
  
“No,” Jin says, defensively. Sometimes when he comes home really late or really drunk Kame gets this look in his eyes, like Jin is about two years old and needs someone to watch over him at all times.  
  
Kame chatters about Okinawa for a while and Jin closes his eyes and tries to go back to sleep, because the truth is, he hates stupid Okinawa and its stupid beaches and shisa and sole-surviving-relatives. He hates pork and sea urchin and bitter melon. He hates stupid Oda Yuichiro.  
  
After a while, Kame runs out of steam and asks, “Did you fall asleep?”  
  
“No,” Jin says.  
  
Kame is quiet for a minute; Jin realises he can hear the roar of the ocean in the background. He imagines Kame sitting on the beach, barefoot with his toes in the sand. He thinks of the way Kame’s calves look when he’s got his jeans rolled up; his hairy, scrawny legs.  
  
“Yuichiro wants me to stay,” he says, “for a while.”  
  
Of course he does, Jin thinks. “Mm,” he says, because he doesn’t know what else to say.  
  
“I don’t know if I will,” Kame says.  
  
You will, Jin thinks. Of course you will.  
  
-  
  
Jin gets a call from a management company on a totally normal Tuesday morning. He is folding t-shirts one moment and listening to a voicemail from some guy called Sanada-san the next, phone pressed between his shoulder and his ear as he juggles with the t-shirts.  
  
Sanada-san sounds crisp and businesslike, addressing Jin in formal language and leaving his number so Jin can call him back.  
  
Yamashita-kun told him about DANCE PIRATE, he says. He wants them to come in and play for them.  
  
Jin debates calling Kame for a little while, taking out his phone and staring at the photo of Kame with his grinning face pressed up against Yuichiro’s. He thinks of Kame’s voice on the phone, the happiness as he’d blabbed on and on about how nice Yuichiro is, how smart. The memory of his voice in the dark in Jin’s room, almost two years ago now, telling Jin about how his family had died.  
  
Jin goes to the audition alone.  
  
-  
  
He expects it to be a fancy office full of gleaming marble and stainless steel, but it kind of looks like any other office; long off-white walls and speckled grey carpet, a row of red seats bolted to the wall. Jin sits in one and flicks through a magazine, snickering when he sees Yamapi posing stiffly with a bunch of gerberas.  
  
There is a row of gold and platinum records on the wall by the reception desk, where a pretty young girl sits at a computer with perfectly styled hair and short, buffed nails. Jin looks at the records when he gets bored of the magazine. He sees a few bands he recognises, even a few he loves; he looks down the hall out of the corner of his eye, half expecting rockstars to swagger through the door at any minute. He’s disappointed when the door opens and the only person who comes through is a portly, aging gentleman in a navy suit. He looks like a nerd.  
  
Jin starts to fidget; he twists the silver ring on his finger and tugs at the hood of his jacket, trying to make it sit flat. A pretty young woman comes out to get him and takes him to where Sanada-san is waiting in a small, plain room without windows. Sanada sits at a table in a black leather jacket and jeans; he looks like a tv detective.  
  
He nods as Jin walks in and gestures to the centre of the room. He doesn’t say anything as Jin sets up his keyboard, or when Jin sits down and flicks on the power.  
  
“Um,” Jin says. “Do I play?”  
  
Sanada just rolls his eyes and nods. There’s a notebook in front of him and Jin can see that he’s already started scratching out notes in black pen. There’s a photo of Jin with Kame peeking out from underneath the notebook; Jin has no idea where he got it. He kind of wants to ask for a copy.  
  
Jin closes his eyes, trying not to think about how if he fucks this up, he’s probably fucking up not only his entire life, but Kame’s too; about how he maybe jumped the gun by not calling Kame so he could be here for this audition; about how he doesn’t know when or if Kame will be back; about how fucking terrifying this moment is.  
  
He just plays, heart in his fingers, dancing on the keys.  
  
“I thought there were two of you,” Sanada says after. He’s got that photo out and he’s looking at it. He points at Kame with his pen. “Kamenashi?”  
  
Jin holds his breath. “He couldn’t make it,” he says. “He’s away on family business.”  
  
Sanada’s face is grim. He’s kind of scary. “You should call him back,” he says. “I think the three of us can do business together.”  
  
-  
  
Sanada says that Jin has a month to get Kame back to Tokyo, otherwise he will take Jin alone or not at all. Jin goes home and tries to decide what the mature, responsible thing to do would be; what Kame might do, if their situations were reversed. What Jin would want him to do.  
  
He realises he’d be pretty angry if Kame went ahead without him. He imagines walking to a record store and seeing Kame’s face on posters without him; hearing Kame’s name on the radio or seeing him on tv. He kicks his trashcan over, a little enraged just at the thought.  
  
Kame deserves the chance to choose, Jin thinks. He’s just got to learn to deal with the fact that Kame might not choose him.  
  
-  
  
Jin goes over to Pi’s house and they get totally wasted, bottles of beer lining up on the coffee table and spilling over until they are scattered on the floor around them.  
  
“This whole thing is your fault,” Jin slurs. “You couldn’t have waited til Kame got back to tell Sanada about us?”  
  
Pi snorts into his beer. “I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t remember telling him about you in the first place. I must have been out of my mind, who wants you to be a rockstar?”  
  
“Everyone,” Jin says. “Kame.”  
  
Yamapi giggles and pokes Jin’s cheek. Lately, he’s been gaining weight, muscles starting to poke out of his tiny, skinny frame. “Your head’s too big already, ne.”  
  
“Shut up,” Jin says, knocking Pi’s hand away. “At least my face isn’t as fat as yours.”  
  
That’s the last thing Jin remembers, but he must have called Kame; he wakes up the next day and his phone is lying open next to him, battery flat. He claws back pieces of his memory and forms a vague impression of Kame’s happy voice as he says hello growing steadily more confused and upset; he can’t remember what he said to him. He doesn’t know if he was rude or just confusing.  
  
“Shit,” Jin groans, and buries his face in his pillow. He wonders if he should call Kame and apologise, but the thought of hearing Kame’s wounded voice makes him sicker than he already felt and he has to lurch to the bathroom to puke.  
  
He texts Kame that night and says, _Sorry,_ but Kame never replies.  
  
-  
  
A few days later Jin leaves the station just as it is getting dark, feet aching and shoulders tense. It’s been a long day; they were having a huge sale, so the store was full of demanding, stingy customers, calling out for him in their gangsta teenage slang. It’s only been a few years since Jin was in high school but even he has only the vaguest idea of what they’re talking about half the time.  
  
He’s about to take the shortcut into the underpass that takes him out to the otherside of the square when he hears the twang of guitar strings floating down from the mouth of the stairs; a few moments later, a familiar voice, high and husky.  
  
He takes the stairs two at a time.  
  
It’s a song Jin has never heard before, with a simple, jangling melody like a jewellery box.  
  
His heart thuds as Kame comes into view; the familiar, longed for hunch of his body over his guitar, his clumsy, skinny legs. He closes his eyes as he sings.  
  
_Just one step at a time; don't let go of my hand  
The days we spent together still live  
Even if we're torn apart til we're ragged  
That time, that place, this bond won't disappear_  
  
There’s no-one else around; it’s like Kame knew, somehow, the exact moment that Jin would step off the train. There’s no-one there to see it when Jin pulls the guitar out of Kame’s arms and out of his reach; when he leans in and kisses him, properly, finally, one hand on the small of Kame’s back and bending him back until he swoons.  
  
-  
  
“How did you know to come back?” Jin asks. They’re sitting in a family restaurant sharing a parfait, Kame’s guitar and all his bags piled up on the empty seats at their table of four. It’s late; the only other people around are a group of salarymen with their foreign conversational English teacher.  
  
“You don’t remember?” Kame replies. He gathers a hunk of strawberry and cream on his spoon and pops it in his mouth. “You called me raving about how we had to run to the stars to reach our dream, or something, and how some guy called Sanada is going to make us famous.”  
  
“Oh,” Jin says. “Sanada. That’s our manager.”  
  
“Yeah,” Kame says. “Then you told me you love me.”  
  
Jin flushes beet red; he can literally feel the blood rushing to his cheeks and to the tips of his ears. “That’s romantic,” he says, stubbornly refusing to admit that he is embarrassed.  
  
“Yeah,” Kame says, deadpan. “I was really swept off my feet.”  
  
“Shut up,” Jin grumbles, ducking his head. “It got you here, didn’t it?”  
  
Kame shrugs and scrapes at the bottom of the almost-empty parfait glass, trying to gather the last bits of chocolate on his spoon. “You should have just told me.”  
  
Jin doesn’t say, _I was afraid._ He says, “It seemed like bad timing. With your brother and everything.”  
  
“It’s not great timing,” Kame agrees. He licks the chocolate off his spoon, oblivious to Jin’s eyes on his soft, pink tongue. “Meeting Yuichiro is one of the greatest things that ever happened to me.”  
  
“I know,” Jin says, looking down at his hands, where he is tearing strips off a napkin and tying them into tiny knots.  
  
Kame touches his wrist. “Meeting you was the other.”  
  
Kame doesn’t often talk like this, not about Jin, not to Jin’s face. He’s very sentimental in grand, abstract terms, talking about the beauty and courage of friendship in general, but he will rarely look at Jin and say anything that says, you are important to me. You matter to me. Jin supposes he thinks that it goes without saying.  
  
It still feels really good to hear.  
  
“I’ve got big dreams, Jin,” he says. “They’re not in Okinawa.”  
  
Jin feels the knives that have been twisting in his side slowly melt away. He reaches out and takes Kame’s hand, laughing a little at the chipped black nailpolish. Kame is so lame sometimes. “[#1](http://www.livejournal.com/rsearch/?tags=%231) supergroup DANCE PIRATE,” Jin murmurs.  
  
“It’s a promise,” Kame says.  
  
“Cross your heart and hope to die?” Jin asks.  
  
“Stick a needle in my eye,” Kame confirms, and leans over to pledge his fealty with a kiss.  
  
-  
  
Sanada-san books them a series of gigs at live houses around the city; at first the turnout is disappointing, but after the third or fourth half-empty room Pi updates his jweb about how they’re his new favourite band and the audience is suddenly full of screaming teenagers with a line out the door that goes down the street. The girls who have followed them from when they were babies with fuzzy eyebrows and mushroom-shaped hair playing Beatles covers in the square, they come and stand at the barrier and bully the other fans who haven’t been there since the beginning.  
  
After their first packed out set, Jin drags Kame into the bathroom in the green room and ravishes him, leaving marks on his neck and on his hips where his fingers press just a little too hard. Kame grabs a fistful of his hair hard enough to hurt.  
  
Later, there will be bad reviews and paparazzi and tabloid speculation, stalkers and screaming fits and brief flirtations with drug abuse, but this first moment - and so many moments later - is completely and uncompromisingly perfect.  
  
The sound of the crowd screaming for an encore reaches Jin through the rushing of blood in his ears. He pulls away from Kame with a groan, licking his thumb to smooth down Kame’s eyebrows.  
  
“Our screaming fans await,” Jin says, throwing up his fists in triumph as he walks out on the stage and they only scream louder.


End file.
